- After studying the current water supply students realized the technical aspects of providing better water were simpler than the politics of it.
Water is life. That was the refrain heard by UMass Amherst undergraduate students during a weeklong expeditionary trip to the western Kenyan village of Namawanga last spring.
The students, members of the campus chapter of Engineers Without Borders, along with their faculty and professional mentors, are working to make potable water more readily available to 1,000 residents of a farming community there. The UMass Amherst group gathered data and scoped out design considerations for the implementation phase to begin next January.
Along the way, civil and environmental engineering major Julie Gagen ’08 met Ruth Khasoa, a wife and mother who, wearing a kanga, the traditional wraparound cloth printed with colorful designs, carries her yellow plastic jerry can to a shallow hand-dug well three times a day to lug back often cloudy and contaminated water for her family. “It’s in the middle of the crops, and cows go through there to plow the land,” says Gagen of the well, “and once the container is contaminated, it stays contaminated.” Having a reliable source of clean water closer to her home will not only help Khasoa keep her family healthier, but it will also free up huge amounts of time for productive activities.
Gagen says the trip was a life-changing experience, helping her realize how she can use her education to help people. But Gagen and her peers spent at least as much time in meetings with community leaders and large assemblies of villagers as they did taking water samples and studying the geology of the area. This drove home another lesson: Water is not only life; water is also power.
Seth Mansur ’08 says the politics “ended up being a lot more touchy than we thought.” Tameron Josbeck ’06 was particularly struck by the fate of a project implemented several years ago where politics, in the form of a dispute between neighbors over the location of a water source, trumped geology. In the end a spring box installed at considerable expense quickly went dry. “We don’t want to be like the group that came all the way from Japan and missed by 100 feet,” said Josbeck.
The original proposal submitted by villagers to Engineers Without Borders (EWB) requested the donation of a drilling rig to be used as the basis for a small business after they had tapped a local supply. “That’s not going to happen,” said project advisor Jeff Hardin ’74, who helped found the campus’s EWB chapter. Hardin owns a civil engineering firm in Millis, Massachusetts. Drilling without proper training can ruin an aquifer very quickly, explains Hardin.
Eric Lehan ’89, an engineer with Tighe & Bond, is part of the western Massachusetts chapter of EWB and is a mentor to the campus chapter. He used vacation time and paid his own airfare to accompany the group to Kenya. “We were received like visiting royalty,” he says. “It was unnerving, school children came up and sang songs . . . the community’s expectations were building, they said ‘thank you’ a thousand times and we hadn’t done anything yet, so the onus is on us to actually do something.”
A high priority for the students now is to raise money. As spokespeople with firsthand knowledge of the project and the Namawanga community, they are approaching groups, such as Rotary Clubs, and individuals to donate toward their target of $30,000 to $40,000 for construction costs. (Rotary International has designated the delivery of clean water to underdeveloped communities a priority.) Senior Chris Arsenault, who was part of the group that went to Kenya, says his local Rotary Clubs in Fitchburg and Leominster, as well as the club in Amherst, are giving solid support.
Gagen will likely be on the implementation team in January. By returning to Kenya she will provide continuity in the relationship she wants to see grow between the campus as a whole and the people of Namawanga.
Many women in the community shared personal stories with Gagen and she gained a deep respect for their culture. “In some ways they have a higher quality of life than we do,” she says. “Their culture is just so rich, they don’t have the kinds of stress that we have, they are very community oriented.” She doesn’t minimize the grinding effects of the poverty she witnessed. Yet in spite of their hardships the people Gagen met exuded a spirit of joy that she found herself envying, even as they perhaps envied her access to unlimited clean water at the turn of a tap back home.
In addition to raising funds, the group is investigating whether to drill bore holes with a rig capable of going several hundred feet into the ground, and if so, how many, in what locations, and with what kind of distribution system. Other options include building a catchment system to capture and store rainwater.
- Engineers Without Borders
The UMass Amherst chapter of Engineers Without Borders was the first in New England and will host the organization’s national conference in spring 2007, a testament to the leadership of the nearly 40 students and faculty advisors actively involved. Since its inception in 2004, Engineers Without Borders-USA has mushroomed to nearly 150 student, regional, and professional chapters. For more information or to donate to the UMass Amherst project in Kenya, visit www.ewb-usa.org.
The team discovered that the technical problems are relatively simple and straightforward. “When you boil it down, what people need is money,” said Gemma Baro-Montes, a graduate student who is overseeing the project. One of the toughest things to figure out, is how to get the most out of limited resources.
Hardin visits campus two or three times a week to advise students. He is impressed by the professional and personal growth he has seen in them. “It’s no trivial exercise to develop a water supply,” says Hardin. He recalled one meeting during which a participant “made the comment that ‘water is power.’ I think there’s a lot to that, and it showed some profound thinking.”
